10 Top Quality Plugins for Creating Custom WordPress Forms

A good-looking form gives your site a professional appearance, and also helps streamline your online communication. A contact form is a great way to offer your readers the ability to get in touch, without giving out your email address.

While most WordPress themes come with built-in contact forms, it’s often better to create your own with a plugin. Creating your own allows you to tailor the look and feel you want for your site, add any extra fields – really, just have total control over your forms.

There are many free and premium form plugins that offer a range of different features depending on what you need. If you’re after something basic it’s best to go with a free plugin like Forminator, but premium plugin such as Forminator Pro, GravityForms or FormCraft will provide a more comprehensive, flexible and customizable forms experience.

Gravity Forms

No doubt Gravity Forms is one of the most popular plugin on this list.

GravityForms lets you design and build your own forms using an intuitive forms editor. Features include multi-page forms, custom settings, the ability to limit entries and schedule forms, standard and advanced fields, pricing and post fields.

Prices start at $39 a year for a personal license and includes support, and unlimited forms and entries. There are also lots of add-ons available with the business and developer licenses that allows you to integrate GravityForms with MailChimp, PayPal, Survey and other services.

Contact Form 7

Contact Form 7 is easy to use. It can manage multiple contact forms, and you can customize forms and any mail content flexibly with HTML. This plugin also support Ajax-powered submitting, CAPTCHA and Akismet spam filtering.

Contact Form 7 can manage multiple contact forms, plus you can customize the form and the mail contents flexibly with simple markup. The form supports Ajax-powered submitting, CAPTCHA, Akismet spam filtering and so on.

Ninja Forms

Ninja Forms is another popular free plugin. It has an easy-to-use drag and drop interface and allows you to create contact forms, email collection forms, or any other form you need on your site.

Some of the plugin’s features include optional Ajax, new form preview mode, styling and layout options, import and export options, anti-spam field, re-usable fields, customizable field options and easy form creation.

For developers, Ninja Forms includes lots of hooks and filters so you can make the most of the plugin’s powerful form building framework.

While the plugin is free, you’ll need to pay for add-ons, of which there are plenty. Easily integrate Ninja Forms with PDF Form Submission, Stripe, PayPal and MailChimp.

Visual Form Builder

This free plugin lets you create forms in a visual way similar to creating menus in the backend of WordPress. It’s easy to add new fields, and reorder fields by drag and drop. The plugin produces shortcodes so you can insert forms anywhere in your site.

There’s a pro version of this plugin that starts at $20 (one-time fee). There are also six add-ons for an additional one-off that allow you to create a post, create a user, display entries, connect your forms to third-party services, collect payments, and style your forms.

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13 Responses

Nice post [as always], Rae. I personally love Ninja Forms and have used their powerful hooks. There will be more extensions for Ninja Forms coming soon! The only drawback for this plugin is that people may have to use custom CSS classes to style it in order for it to match the theme they are using.

Thank you for your post. We use Gravity Forms exclusively and it’s well worth the fee for the Developer license. We especially like the integration with Stripe. I wonder which of these form apps have the best reporting tools for form entry.

Formidable Pro rocks. I’ve found it much easier to use than other form plugins and their support is outstanding. Not to mention that unlike other premium plugins, it’s a one-time fee to purchase the plugin instead of an ongoing annual license. After the first year if you need support you can purchase another year’s worth of support, but it’s considerably less than the price of the plugin and if you don’t need support, you don’t need to buy it.

Another happy Gravity Forms user. Gravity Forms has never failed me, my clients love the thing, and its allowed us to build a Happy Cog-esque multiple page contact form that handles most of our onboarding, recruiting, and other needs.

I absolutely love Contact Form 7 plugin, it works they it should, nothing more and nothing less. Many plugins tends to go overboard with contact form features.

Gravity forms is really good plugin too. There is another plugin AirTightForm http://airtightform.com which I found it through WarriorForum. It looks pretty good if you want a more advanced solution with leads, emails and reporting.

I’m trying to find a form plugin that will produce an image with the form data that can be shared in a forum. I’ve found plugins that will save the data to a database or a spreadsheet, but I need something that will pull that data, format it and create an image with it. Am I asking for too much? Perhaps another plugin that will pull the data and display it?

Visual Form Builder (Pro) used to be a darn great form builder, with conditional rules and a lot of great features. Regrettably, when they released version 3, it is full of bugs and the form creation process has become so encumbered that it is not even worth considering anymore.

For example, in version 2, I could create a “section”, then put 20 questions in that section. Then I would select the “Conditional Rules” and have that section be displayed with all of its child fields.

In version 3, everything is flat – no sections, so now you need to write 20 rules instead of one. And that’s only the beginning of the un-usability issues.

Why on earth do developers with great products trash them like this? Especially for a PAID plug-in that’s not exactly cheap. It is so disheartening.